photograph credit: Guthrie Whitby’s Website

The following reflection was written by Hawthorne.

For those of us who have experienced infertility, Mother’s Day is a loaded and weighty phrase. I believe that infertility changes everything about us as human beings, and how we view such a simple holiday doesn’t escape that change.

Growing up, Mother’s Day had little to do with me, really. It was the day we got flowers for our mom, wrote her cards, and my dad would take us out to eat so mom didn’t have to cook. As a young adult, Mother’s Day became a day that also celebrated my sweet sister who had become a mother too.

Then my husband and I started trying to have kids and month after month, nothing happened. By the time the first Mother’s Day rolled around, we had been trying for exactly a full year. I remember trying not to think about it, trying not to relate myself to the day in anyway, but I got a card from someone who said she was thinking of me on this “hard day,” and suddenly it became that.

I dreaded going to church, specifically, because most church services do something celebratory of moms on that day, like having them all stand up and people clap, or doing a sermon dedicated to motherhood. I am beyond grateful that that has not been the case at the church I attend, at least since I’ve been infertile. My brother-in-law is the worship pastor and usually says something about the complicated nature of the day: How it is sweet for some who are moms and some who have moms, but painful for moms whose kids are in trouble or who have passed, and so heavy for those whose moms may have passed or those whose moms have been unkind, harmful, or abusive. He also acknowledged the heaviness of those who would love to be mothers but can’t. Hearing him say that made me realize that Mother’s Day could function essentially as a day to mark my grief, my pain of not being able to have a baby after a lifetime of assuming I could and would be able to.

For three years, that’s what Mother’s Day has been to me: A day to remember and process a little of that grief that I carry. To find a corner and cry, and realize that I am not alone in my grief. There are so many women in my life who fall into one of the categories my brother-in-law listed, and for all of us, Mother’s Day can be a day to remember our grief. Infertility is such an intangible, hard thing to explain to people. It is grieving for the non-existence of someone you desperately love and want to know, and in that very real way, it is grieving a death. Unlike grieving someone who has died though, there is no death date or birth date to mark the loss. For me, that is what Mother’s Day became.

This year will be different as after three years of trying—with many I.U.I.’s, an IVF, an embryo transfer, and another year of having given up the idea of having biological kids–I am pregnant. I’ve been thinking about Mother’s Day coming up with incredible confusion and complicated emotions. I still feel the need to grieve the lost years, the pain I experienced, the babies I miscarried early through IVF, and the permanent change that infertility caused in me. But I also want to be able to celebrate the life growing in me. I don’t know that I’ll ever figure it out or that it will ever be easy for me to know how to handle this day, but I never want to forget the road I have traveled or the countless friends I have who are still there.